


prayers spun from gold (like songs spun from gods)

by Elisye



Series: diasee an diasee [1]
Category: Ar tonelico
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Medley AU, my city my canon retcon rewrite au now!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, why is it so hard to find the full names of sol cluster people aka aoto's mom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-12
Updated: 2020-06-12
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:34:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24683179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elisye/pseuds/Elisye
Summary: It's hard to believe in miracles and fate when it spills from your hapless, helpless voice.(Somewhere along the fifth axis, a seven-year-old Aoto is struck with a sudden case of Border Disease. And survives it, with all the consequences that entails.)
Relationships: Aoto & Juju | Lynelle, Aoto & Original Character, Aoto & Steeps
Series: diasee an diasee [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1784602
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2





	prayers spun from gold (like songs spun from gods)

For the longest time, it’s always been just you and your mom.

You know it’s weird not to have a dad in the picture, but you don’t ask about him. Or rather, you did just once, saw Mom’s smile go from normal to normal but weird, and she patted your head while saying, in too soft, too careful words, that she would tell you some other time, later, when you’re old enough. In response, you had tilted your head and made a big frown, because that’s such a boring answer and you _are_ old enough! She always says that you’re a big boy.

Another head pat. Then she laughed, which is closer to normal-normal, but something was off, a little, still. “I know you are. And to be very honest, I want to talk about him too. There’s so much, really, that I want to say about your dad.” A pause. “But you see, there’s something very… unusual, about your dad. Something that takes time to tell.

“Time to heal, before I can think about it long enough.”

Your big frown turned into the biggest frown as you watched your mom start to fiddle with her necklace - a very strange-looking but important present from Dad, apparently - while her eyes drifted, seeming to look through you, dimming in a way that even your child self could see wasn’t a good thing. But only far, far in the future would you recognize it for what it was, the invisible ghosts crossing the distant horizon.

So at that time, for that moment, your mom eventually shook her head and told you not to wonder about it too much, at least for now. In the end, no matter what, what’s truly important to remember is that he loved you as much as Mom loves you. And that’s that.

You will not notice the past tense until you turn seven.

“When I grow up, I’m gonna be just like you, Mom!”

Mom laughs as she ruffles your hair, tucking the tablet pen in her other hand behind her ear. “Oh, but I thought you didn’t like staying in the laboratories with me?”

“Not like _that!_ ” You huff with a pout. Sure, you like running around in your mom’s lab coats and seeing how they flare and fly about as you jump around - but they also smell a little weird, sterile and metallic and chemicals, and they aren’t made from _the_ comfiest thing either. “Science is cool and all but it’s boooooring. I don’t wanna be a scientist.”

“Awww, but I like seeing you around the labs.” Your mom fake-pouts in return and ruffles your hair some more. She giggles after a while of messing up your already poor excuse for a hairstyle, her voice becoming a little softer - “But I get what you mean, Aoto. Though I doubt it will ever be possible, still, I think it would be nice to have a duet, just the two of us. A binasphere one especially.”

“What’s a duet?” You tilt your head in puzzlement. “And binasphere?”

“A duet is when two people sing together. And binasphere is a special way for multiple reyvateils to sing at once.”

“Then I wanna sing a duet with you then!”

“With how tone-deaf you are?” Light but not patronizing. Still, you tug at her lab coat with insistent irritation at the question. You aren’t tone-deaf! Like, sure, the one time you played an instrument or danced to a song, you weren’t the best or the greatest at any of it, but still! You can do it if you try hard enough.

Another soft pat of your head. Mom shakes her head, as if reading your thoughts - you nearly did consider trying to play another instrument, just now. “It’s okay, Aoto. When you’re older, you’re going to be the best singer in all of Sol Cluster. Not a reyvateil unfortunately, but even so, I think you will craft the most wonderful songs for people to hear.”

Your mom gives a reassuring smile. Similarly, you grin at her words, and take them as a promise.

A promise that goes up in flames several months later, when your head suddenly splits open to hellfire and agony and pain pain _pain it hurts mom it HURTS—!_

After an eternity compressed into a blind minute, an unspeakable and undefinable amount of time, you wake up to the news that your mother has passed away. The funeral after is solemn and hasty, spent swallowing down a song about frostbite and quiet disasters passing in the night.

At least you’re not tone-deaf anymore.

A scary old man takes you in, bringing you to a hamlet on the furthest edges of the Peaks. For several days, weeks, bordering on a few months - you lock yourself into your room and hum the softest melodies under a heavy blanket, watching as ice forms and snow swirls around your fingers. When you’re not singing yourself to a numb sleep, you occasionally pry at the documents hidden at the bottom of your belongings, a stash of scientific jargon doodled on the margins of descriptive diagrams.

You weren’t the one who packed the luggage, though.

A coworker of your mom had helped with packing your things instead. A close family friend who gave you one last pat on the head as you were to depart out the gates of the city, kneeling down to whisper in your ear - “Lynelle - your mother - left something very important with you. Please read it. It’s really, really important that you know, Aoto.”

And while at first you wanted to do nothing more than to pretend the world didn’t exist, that nothing had ever happened in your life - you ultimately couldn’t pretend for too long. The ceiling is the wrong color every time you wake up.

So, over those several days and weeks, you squint at scribbled letters accompanying the abstract pictures, getting a somewhat better sense of what you were left with as you riffle through a dictionary of terms and explanations penned in your mom’s handwriting.

—There were moments where you didn’t want to read though, didn’t want to understand - her handwriting just made you remember too much - but eventually, you would give in to nostalgia and longing and read on, learning what you can about yourself. About what became of you on the impossible day your head became attuned to sound.

And it was good that you did, since a few years after you moved here, your body begins to scream again in pain, from the mechanical breakdown of your wave composition. Pounding on Steeps’ door isn’t a great idea at any time of the day, much less in the wee hours of the morning, but you do it and against the man’s irritable expression, you fearfully squeak that you needed diquility, _now,_ sooner than later, or you’re going to learn just where your mom went to after she died.

Thankfully, despite his sheer disbelief and astonishment, he comes through for you in the end. Though not cheaply - from that day onwards, you’re forced to come out of your room for more than just silent meals, and to learn how to become a steeplejack in the future.

Better than being kicked out of the house for being a liar or a mistake, at any rate.

As you settle, proper, into your new home, all is quiet. You spend it as any other growing boy would, relearning the fun in chasing sunlight and drawing shapes in the clouds on breezy days. Hours are spent getting to know the villagers better, the lumberjacks and the farmers and the merchants that come and go and sometimes stay, for a while or forever. In a rotating schedule of mornings, Steeps drags your half-sleepy head to meet masons and carpenters, where the trainees and experts alike teach you the basics of construction and thus the things you need to know to fix things. In the afternoons, you run around with the few adults that indulge you with sweets and snacks, and the quiet evenings are spent blabbering things to your foster dad over good food. Sleep starts to come easier and easier, until you’re back to being instantly knocked out the moment your head hits the pillow.

Though that’s not always the case. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, you wake up to a dream of burning static in your head, to a nightmare where you’re left to stare at the foggy memory of a gravestone for what feels like an eternity. The details are disappearing, you realize at some point - so on those bad nights, you begin a habit of skimming through the research you were left with, staring at the papers that sometimes makes sense and sometimes still don’t, even with the explanations made painstakingly simple for your sake. On especially bad nights, you take out a letter buried among the schematics, reading the hasty scribbles cut short because there was no time to say everything except _goodbye, my sweet son_ and _remember that I always loved you._

You would trace your finger along the cursive to remember the happier things. And the not so happier things. Quietly thinking back on what happened, try to reorganize the disappearing pieces into as clear a memory as you can afford to manage. (There are things you just don’t want to remember, don’t want to accept, no matter what.)

You would remember the quiet hallways of your mom’s workplace, the sudden shouting at the end of one corridor, the stern voice of an unfamiliar man and your mom’s response highlighted with an angry sharpness. The conversation spiraling into an argument and crossing a line too many - the muffled threats and the sudden fear and your blind adrenaline as you ran in with a split-second decision to tackle the man who dared to take away the only family you ever knew—

And then there had been pain, the physical kind, as you were shoved away - your mother calling your name with a score of horror as you hit your head on something hard - the man continuing on with no more than a cursory look at you and a smidge of unforgettable irritation to his voice - _“You will give me that key, Dr. Juju, or the two of you might just meet the same end as your wretched husband.”_

And then there had been _pain,_ the one that nearly killed you, as everything soon registered and a swirling chaos of thoughts and feelings erupted from the hidden meaning in those words.

On the outskirts of the hamlet, close enough that you won’t run into monsters but far enough that no one will catch you - you breathe your thoughts into the air and watch the mirages of your heart take shape. Your mind has an instinctive understand of what you can do, and you get the faint impression that it isn’t much. Two songs, red magic and blue magic, _was au ga lamenza echrra_ —you have only your traumas to sing about.

You pick up a random twig on the ground, squeezing the bark into pink imprints on your palms. You don’t want to be like this, you think quietly. Just like this. Forever like this. Reyvateils are strong people - you know this because your mom had a clear voice and a large heart overflowing with so many colors, with passion and confidence and soft lullabies that never had the same lyrics as she tucked you in at night, _wee yea ra revm pitod infel yor_ \- you remember that, in a time not too long ago, you said you wanted to be like your mom. 

And you still want to be like her. Strong and determined and willing to save her loved ones no matter the cost. The twig snaps into pieces from the duress of that thought. You _will_ be like her, you think quietly, then loudly - you want to, you have to, so you will. You will become someone stronger, someone who won’t lose their loved ones, who won’t be helpless in the face of danger.

You absolutely will.

Thus, a few days later, you endure a two hour ranting lecture from Steeps on the sheer stupidity of trying to modify a steeplejack’s tools into weapons, especially while having _no idea_ about how you were even going about it. No one said the road ahead was going to be smooth sailing anyway.

But hey, it also got one of the older steeplejacks to teach you gathmelding, so at least you got something cool out of it, right?

Time passes. You never falter in your ambitions. You never doubt your own hopes.

But you will doubt yourself, sometimes.

Tucked into a corner that oversees the area by a mile, a small building houses everyone with a job in construction or something of the sort. As you begin to graduate from enduring mindless lectures and more technical reading than a kid would like to do, you’ve started to spend your mornings and some afternoons here, getting practice with the tools or sometimes shadowing someone.

One of those afternoons finds you reading a blueprint detailing how to repair the tiling on certain types of rooftops. While you’re busy puzzling out what any of it means and having no luck whatsoever, a few apprentices walk in with wrapped sandwiches and yawns about wanting a longer lunch break. They settle in the opposite side of the room after a few polite greetings aimed your way - some that you return as briefly and simply, a bit preoccupied with the blueprint still - before taking the next twenty minutes or so to just relax in this peaceful solitude. They chatter at random, from the recent weather to a resident’s wedding to the latest Cleansing that happened last week.

“—damn Clustanians, I swear,” one of them grumbles between munches of their sandwich. “Just because they’re reyvateils with their fancy song magic and crap, they think they can do shit all to us humans…”

“Hey, hey, calm down, there’s a kid in the room, you know.” A delicate pause. “That being said, I feel you there… But really, what can we do? We can’t beat them in numbers or power.”

“So, what, you’re saying we should just let them control us like this? Let those reyvateils just ruin our damn lives as they please?”

“I— I’m not! I’m just saying we shouldn’t do anything stupid when they can easily kill us all if they wanted to.”

A barked laugh. It sounds brittle. “They’re going to kill us no matter what. ‘s just a matter of time.”

“Why do they have to do this?” A third voice speaks, this one soft - just thinking aloud, unintentionally. A deep sigh follows from the group. You can’t help but curl into yourself, for some unclear reason weighing heavy on you. “I wish they would just stop and just… I don’t know, leave us alone? Let us live as we like?”

“A stupid dream if I’ve ever seen one.”

“I know. I just—” The sounds of the wrappers being scrunched up. Soon, they get tossed into the nearest trash bin. “My cousin was there. At the Cleansing that happened.”

“What— _Fuck,_ Matthew, why the hell didn’t you tell us—!”

“You guys! There is a _kid_ here! At least keep the cussing down, will you?”

“Yeah, an old enough kid that’s gonna hear this stuff sooner than later. You can’t baby them all, Lenas.”

“We can at least stop scaring them too much, jeez! Just look at Aoto, he looks like a cat that got dropped into a lake right now.”

The use of your name gets you to snap your head in the apprentices’ direction. You blink wide eyes at their sheepish or disgruntled faces, at the soft apologies given before they return to their conversation in even quieter whispers. You weren’t—scared, or at least you don’t think you were, just now. Were you? What was there to even be scared about? They were talking about the Clustanians. The reyvateil-only society of Sol Cluster.

You hurriedly look back down at the blueprints you were studying, trying to resume where you left off. Keyword being, you try, and then stop trying altogether. Stopped a good while back, actually. When the group had walked in and starting cursing about the sheer misery of being weaker than reyvateils and their power. About the monstrosity that you are, what you could possibly do if you so wished as well. Not that you would though! You would never misuse your powers, never sing an apocalypse onto all these people that care about you so.

(Would they care about you, though, if they knew?)

You stare at the blueprints for a long, long time. 

In the end enough, you go home, listen to Steeps’ grumbling over dinner, and sleep. And you get up the next morning, the summer light so warm and promising, so bright and suffocating, that there’s no way you can go back to sleep. Not that you want to. Breakfast is an omelette. It’s burnt, always is, but Steeps is trying. He’s trying, he hasn’t said anything, hasn’t spilled the beans. The only thing he does is raise an eyebrow when he finds you awake before your tenth alarm clock has rang, and you just grin and say you’re gonna try to fix the neighbor's chimney all by yourself with some hodgepodge selection of tools you found in the shed and _that_ jumpstarts a five hour lecture so loud he could’ve woken up the entire village. Maybe he did, actually.

In any case, your ears are twisted a near-permanent red after that, and everyone - everyone, from the petite granny down the road who likes giving you extra snacks to your trade mentors and fellow apprentices - keep making empathetic comments on it throughout the day. But you keep grinning and snickering as you indulge a young boy’s usual penchants for mindless mischief once in a while and the days and the weeks pass and pass and - _this is fine!_

This is fine, yes. All exactly as you sort of wanted.

Even as you spend your time more on tools and construction, on work and living, even as you spend a bit less of your spare hours on secret sessions trying to weave the violent swings of an improvised weapon between hymns of a coffin being encased in ever-creeping frost - because you _can’t,_ you know, you can’t forget, you want to (have to, there’s no choice, for the worst, for the inevitable) be strong for the amount of love (and fear) in your heart - you think, indeed, this is fine. It’s not perfect, because a perfect world wouldn’t have dead parents and conspiracies you still don’t have the faintest idea about, but this isn’t so bad either, honestly. So long as it stays like this, slow and quaint and forgetful to the last detail.

Some more years later, a strange girl shows up one day, prays for miracles from a god that shouldn’t be listening, and everything turns into cake. And nothing is nor will be slow and quaint and forgetful as you run for your life, to some other future along the axis.

**Author's Note:**

> i have too many stupid grandiose angst ideas and it shows ww
> 
> some random trivia notes -
> 
> * Aoto's song magic is, funnily enough in my head, mostly blue magic. He gains like one or two red magic songs over time, but otherwise, his song magic is very protection based. And also tends to inflict status elements akin to slow, stun, and poison.  
> 
> * Why ice song magic???????????? Watch the opening for AT3. Look at the snow motifs. His outfit is lined with some fur. And his hair is bright white and his eyes are bright blue like if he weren't wearing red and acted like a shounen protagonist, he miiiiiiight look like an ice-theme guy. Also reyvateil designs love to be deceptive in that the character looks and acts in complete opposite to how their song magic is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO  
> 
> * I, uh, tweaked a LOT of backstory to make this AU work and honestly, I still haven't figured out the far-reaching consequences of that (especially re: Raphael and Archia) so it's possible that such details will get reconned if I write more for this AU, BUT IF ANYONE WANTS TO KNOW WHAT I TWEAKED ANYWAY:  
> 
>  **1)** Aoto's parents moved to work at the Moebius Factory as in canon, but Raphael got suspicious of Kiraha and the Ancient Faction and the activity of their former members earlier than in canon. This led to Aoto's dad dying, though his mom survived. Not for very long, since Raphael made a personal visit to figure out what loose ends to take for himself from the Ancient Faction's research so far.  
>  **2)** I wish I could say Aoto survived his Border Disease episode because his address conveniently fell into acceptable parameters, but that's not canon and I'm not that nice. So he had a legitimate, dangerous episode that could have led to him becoming an Ultimate Border Human, but thank god there was someone with authority in the Archia Think Tank to order an address reassignment and a very willing address donation from Aoto's reyvateil mom :D  
>  **3)** (well sorta willing since it came at the cost of the Harvestasha boot key being handed over to Raphael but like, what choice did she have, otherwise.)  
>  **4)** This still works out when Aoto first meets Raphael in the events of AT3 proper, as Aoto has a much clearer memory than he'd like of the incident between his mom and Raphael, so though his recollection of the man who threatened his mom is a little jumbled and faded in places, he very, very much remembers what the man sounds like. Especially the moment he speaks. And while Aoto, being his shounen protagonist self, did give the benefit of doubt, it wasn't a lot. So at the last minute, he withheld the boot key that Kiraha gave him, and instead gave some other excuse about needing to see Katene.  
> 
> * Aoto's characterization here in comparison to canon is, on the surface, not different - he still acts like a cheerful, determined, protective shounen protagonist who's more blind muscle than brain. However, of course, that's just on the surface. Inwardly, he's a little (or a lot, your call) more keen and attentive about everything, and uses his boisterous behavior to bury an anxiety of people fearing and hunting him down if they find out he can use song magic, in addition to the irrational thought that he's on a constant moral trapeze as someone who can mimic the powers (and thus mindsets) of the ruthless Clustanians. Also his shounen sense of duty and protection to others is like, through the roof exactly because of his anxieties and what happened to his mom.  
> 
> * How I decided to translate the Hymmnos if curious lol:  
> 
> \---(was au ga lamenza echrra): My laments echo deep, insufferably.  
> \---(wee yea ra revm pitod infel yor): Let us dream together a kind dream, dear, dear child.


End file.
